Count me in as one of those who sees blogs, at least in their current form, as a passing fad. Well, not a fad exactly. Fads by definition are rather short lived and have a pretty definite beginning and end. No, blogs as we know them are just a point on a personal communication technology line extending into the future.
Eric Zorn blogs about this very thing today:
I'm not a futurist by any means, but my guess is that these highly-texty Web journals we now call blogs will continue to converge with the multi-media personal online home pages (MySpace and so on). Powerful, easy-to-use, free design software and big tubes for bandwidth will transform blogs into online personal magazines with video, audio and all kinds of cool, interactive stuff we can now only barely imagine.I think that’s right. Nothing stays the same and blogs will continue to evolve until they are, well, something else. I’ve been blogging just two years and already I feel my site is dated and a bit boring. I’m too lazy to seek out sleek new ways to present myself unless it is insanely easy to incorporate. For example, I do regularly utilize YouTube, bringing something to the blog that would have been nearly impossible when I began.
Blog entries will be an important component of such sites (name suggestions, anyone?) in many cases, but the sites themselves will not be called blogs and their proprietors won't be called bloggers.
Think of how progress rendered such terms as "hi-fi," "word processor," "car phone" and "answering machine" quaint, unnecessary and inadequate...
Or maybe it’s just a matter of semantics; you say blog, I say personal magazine. There will always be an interest in reading (or hearing or seeing) what others have to say. So maybe the underlying concept of blogs will live on but they will little resemble what we see today.
The good news is, when blogs are no longer called blogs, bloggers (or whatever they are called in the future) will no longer be able to contort the word blog into a new hybrid of a real word (e.g. blogosphere, blogtastic, and any one of the dozens of tortured uses I’ve come up with here).
1 comment:
The two enterprenuers which started Google in their garage have a very definate idea about the future.
Think Star Trek - from the 60's.
The computer does what?
It recognizes voice commands, and has a huge database, and can provide instant answers to any question - thus the Google Search.
Blogs? Those are the Personal Logs which those aboard the enterprise keep.
It will go multimedia, but it's not like anyone is going to force a person to keep a personal log - or to say they must use video, and audio to the exclusion of text.
But we have a long way to go before everyone is keeping some kind of log.
I read a news report recently that some futurist believes that within our lifetimes recording devices can be made so small, that people will carry them around with them, and leave them on.
Recording important, and unimportant events in their lives.
They'll then upload all that to some type of backup to their memory, accessible to them if they ever need it.
Sounds inevitable.
Can you imagine looking back on some of the conversations you had with some of the girls you dated?
Oh my - maybe it's not such a good idea after all.
JP
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